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Reﬂecting Basqueness: Bilbao from mausoleum to museum1 Nerea Arruti

Abstract Keywords This paper studies the links between death and renewal in the city of Bilbao, and the aura tension between the city as museum and mausoleum – that is, the dynamic relationship mausoleum between memory and oblivion. The uniqueness of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum museum will be problematized, contrasting Adorno’s and Benjamin’s views on aura. The paper will also explore to what extent a new critical framework is necessary to study the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum as the paradigm of the new museum.

La muerte no mata, entierra. 1 I would like to thank the Carnegie Trust in 2 Jorge Oteiza Scotland for granting me the funds to accomplish this project. The radical transformation of the image of the city of Bilbao has been showcased as the urban success story of the late 1990s. From being ‘the 2 José Luis Barbería, ‘Una visita a Oteiza’, museum of environmental horrors’,3 as the North American ecologist Barry El País Semanal, 17 Commoner described the city during his visit in the mid 1970s, it is now March 2002, p. 80. championed as the global paradigm of ‘the museum of the future’.4 The 3 Kike Antolín, Iñaki Barcena and Pedro steep ecological price paid for its economic activity, a direct result of heavy Ibarra, ‘Transporte e industry, was eloquently summed up by a scar visible on the face of the city identidad urbana en el in the 1990s; a heavily polluted river running right through its heart, with Bilbao metropolitano’, in Iñaki Barcena (ed.), no visible wealth associated with it and no longer a source of pride to Bilbo, nora zoaz?: ¿Es bilbaínos. In this article, I want to explore how the city of Bilbao fought sostenible nuestro modelo de ciudad?, Bilbao: Eki, against its own death, by creating a flagship project that paid homage to the Erreka and Bakeaz, very death of the industrial forces behind the harsh aesthetics of the city. As 1998, p. 47. a consequence, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, is by its very definition, a 4 Victoria Newhouse, Towards the New project riddled with unsolvable paradoxes. Museum, New York: If we explore all the ramifications of death in connection with the The Monacelli Press, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, first and foremost comes the anxiety 1997. concerning the future (or lack of future) of the city before the project took 5 Michael Keating, The City that Refused to Die: place. As Michael Keating explored in his study on the city of Glasgow, the Glasgow: The Politics of fear of urban decay and death is a powerful symbol that politicians utilize.5 If Urban Regeneration, Aberdeen: Aberdeen Glasgow was the city that refused to die, Bilbao followed in its footsteps. University Press, 1988. Leaving the symbolic dimension aside, there is also a more literal connection 6 Iñaki Esteban, J.A. between the Guggenheim and death. The Americans chose for its location a González Carrera and section of ‘La Campa de los Ingleses, un cementerio de [in]migrantes Alberto Tellitu, El mila- gro Guggenheim: Una británicos que la pujante actividad portuaria de Bilbao convirtió más tarde en ilusión de alto riesgo, muelle y almacén de maderas’.6 By the time this burial site was chosen as the Bilbao: El Correo, 1997. The site is also location for the Guggenheim Museum, all that was left was just one more reported to have been industrial ruin cluttering the city; an empty warehouse, this one particularly a Carlist graveyard by

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7 the newspaper La striking because it was directly facing the University of Deusto. In the case of Vanguardia (quoted by the Guggenheim, the museum has literally been placed on a site of death and, Xon de Ros, ‘The Guggenheim Museum metaphorically, on the ashes of the industrial past. The chosen location Bilbao’ in Jo Labanyi invokes Adorno’s words in his piece ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ where he speaks (ed.), Constructing Identity in Contemporary of the connection between museum and mausoleum: Spain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, The German word ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’] has unpleasant overtones. It describes p. 291). objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in 7 A photograph of the site is available in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than Cooje van Bruggen, the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than Frank O. Gehry: 8 Guggenheim Museum phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchres of works of art. Bilbao, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1997, p. The early twentieth-century avant-garde resisted the staleness and the 25. perceived lack of dynamism of the museum as a social institution. It is no 8 Theodor Adorno, ‘Valéry Proust coincidence that the late 1980s-doomed proposal by the Basque artist Jorge Museum’ in Prisms, Oteiza (1908-2003), which failed just before planning for the Guggenheim London: Neville Spearman, 1967, p. had started, was not titled ‘museo’ but ‘centro cultural’. It was to be built in 175. La Alhóndiga and was popularly known as ‘el Cubo’ due to its proposed 9 9 For a detailed modernist design. The very name, ‘centro’ of this failed project embodies discussion of this the resistance of the modernist artist, in this case Oteiza, against the connec- project see Joseba Zulaika, Crónica de una tion between museum and mausoleum, between art and decay. Oteiza’s seducción, Madrid: attacks against the Guggenheim project can thus be set against his own resis- Nerea, 1997, pp. 29- 30. tance to the end of modernism: this iconic avant-garde artist is mourning modernism’s demise. His centre would have encompassed an exhibition space for contemporary art but also a library, music auditorium and workshops for artists. Aesthetics, creativity and pedagogy were intrinsically linked in Oteiza’s space. By the time the Guggenheim project itself was proposed in 1991, Oteiza’s modernism-inspired venture was truly dead and buried. A whole way of life for the city, revolving around heavy industry, had also been laid to rest by this time. If industrialization had forged the elements of the city’s identity, then this had been progressively eroded and as a result the city, refusing to die, was desperately searching for an alternative. In 1992, the photographers Jesús Angel Miranda and Fidel Raso published a photographic essay capturing images from the industrial left bank (‘margen izquierda’) of the city. A series of black and white shots (120 images altogether) are presented as testimony of a disappearing world, as memento mori. Many of these images are of industrial ruins and all of them have the black framing evoking the standard Spanish death notice (‘esquela’). It is signiﬁcant that this collection of photographs is now available for sale at the shop inside the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. These photographs, which inhabit the space between memory and oblivion, point towards a complex relationship between past and present in the urban landscape, particularly in the context of a post-Guggenheim Bilbao. Miranda and Raso present themselves as the last generation to have witnessed the industrial history of the city and as such conceptualize the function of their photography as being to record a world that was rapidly disappearing:

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Durante ese largo período recorrimos de forma sistemática todo el escenario 10 Bold in the original industrial de la gran cuenca del Nervión. Rincón a rincón, fiesta a fiesta, text and with use of capital letter in costumbre a costumbre, fuimos registrando con nuestras cámaras lo que ‘Últimas’. entendíamos como Últimas huellas de identidad10 de una cultura o civilización que 11 Jesús Ángel Miranda fue pasando durante un siglo y dejó su marca propia e inconfundible.11 and Fidel Raso, Margen izquierda/Ezkerraldea: Últimas huellas de identi- What exactly is being remembered here? If we go back to early 1992, Bilbao dad, Bilbao: Bilbao was struggling with a series of crises. Its heavy industries were no longer a Bizkaia Kutxa, 1993, p. 2. source of wealth; steelworks and shipyards had been closed down. The demise of these heavily polluting industries brought environmental relief to 12 Victoria Newman, op. cit., p. 245. the city, which could now begin to cleanse itself: the toxic river Nervión 13 J.L. Azkarate, ‘El began to flow cleaner, shedding the metallic colour of its industrial past, and Guggenheim es un the construction of the underground system helped to reduce air pollution. guiño al patrimonio técnico’ (30 June 1997) Victoria Newman, like other critics, has viewed the design of the at Guggenheim as a homage to the industrial heritage of Bilbao, connecting http://canales.elcorre- 12 odigital.com/guggenhe the formal aspect of the building to its industrial past. In contrast, Eusebi im/archivo/970630cu. Casanelles, the director of the Museum of Technology of Barcelona, takes htm, accessed 27 the opposite view. He thinks that the museum merely ‘winks’ at the city’s September 2003. heritage by paying lip service to the technological advances brought about 14 For a more detailed 13 analysis of the by heavy industry. He considers Los Altos Hornos – universally viewed by importance of Los architectural historians as one of the iconic ‘industrial cathedrals’14 of the Altos Hornos see José Eugenio Villar, Spanish process of industrialization – as distinctively unique to Bilbao in a Catedrales de la industria, way that the Guggenheim is not. Gehry, he argues, could have easily built a Baracaldo: Ediciones similar structure in some other place, but Los Altos Hornos is unique, de la Librería San Antonio, 1994 and authentic and cannot be reproduced. The similarities between the recently Julián Sobrino, unveiled Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Arquitectura industrial en España, 1930-1990, Bilbao, both designed by Frank Gehry, provide support for Eusebi Madrid: Cátedra, 1996. Casanelles’s general line of argument. Industrial architecture is a potent 15 J.L. Azkarate, op. cit. emblem of the region’s identity: ‘Porque la cultura industrial que arrancó en 16 J.L. Azkarate, op. cit. el siglo pasado ha quedado ya obsoleta y la industrialización es uno de los hechos diferenciales más importantes de Cataluña y el País Vasco.’15 From the perspective of Casanelles, the museum represents a kitsch replica of an authentic historical heritage that should be preserved in its own right. However, this position can also be problematic for the city. All cities change and adapt, shedding parts of their past in the process. Furthermore, not all of Bilbao’s industrial past can realistically be preserved – a fact that is acknowl- edged by Casanelles himself, who does accept that destruction is part of the process of selection. In his view, the role of industrial archaeology would be to select certain testimonial examples that will be preserved into the future to illustrate the industrial past.16 If the goal was to preserve everything then the city itself would become both a museum and a mausoleum. Los Altos Hornos deserves its listed-building status, but, paradoxically, this monument to progress has become a symbol of the city’s decay. For bilbaínos, it is easier to reflect upon the play of light on the Guggenheim’s titanium surface as a means of projecting themselves into a better future, than upon the rusty structure of Los Altos Hornos, anchored in a heavy industrial era.

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17 Juan Carlos Eguillor, At points of radical modernization, nostalgic views of the city emerge. Los Bilbaos soñados, The artist Juan Carlos Eguillor (1947-) pays homage to the old Bilbao in his Bilbao: Exposiciones Ayuntamiento de drawings; that is, the industrial Bilbao, which he much prefers to the new Bilbao, 2001. one.17 There is nothing unusual in this nostalgic display of the urban past 18 Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis when forces of modernization change a familiar urban landscape. As Beatriz Borges: A Writer on the Sarlo says: ‘Borges affirms that “One function of art is to bequeath an Edge, London: Verso, 18 1993, p. 23. illusory yesterday to men’s memory.”’ In this manner, Jorge Luis Borges 19 J.I. Ruiz de writes a homage in his book and essay Evaristo Carriego (1931) to the minor Olabuénaga, Bilbao, la poet Evaristo Carriego (1883-1912) and to the neighbourhood of Palermo ciudad soñada,vols. 1 as an orilla of the city of Buenos Aires, at a time when the area, as he and 2, Bilbao: Bilbao Bizkaia Kutxa, 2000. describes it, is no more. 20 Jeremy MacClancy, Neither does the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum represent the first time that ‘Nationalism at Play: the city of Bilbao has dreamt of change. Its colourful history is full of unreal- the Basques of Vizcaya & Athletic Club de ized projects, as demonstrated in the two-volume study by the sociologist José Bilbao’, in Jeremy Ignacio Ruiz de Olabuénaga, Bilbao, la ciudad soñada. He sees the historical MacClancy (ed.), Sport, Identity and Ethnicity, emergence and development of the city of Bilbao in the context of its capacity Oxford: Berg, 1996, p. to project itself into the future, and contextualizes the new Bilbao in a series 182. of dreams.19 If we focus on foreign influences and how Basques see themselves, 21 Alberto Bacigalupe again this is not the first time that the future has influenced definitions of dreams up the following based on the fact identity. As the anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy argues, when discussing that before San Mamés how football came to be embraced in Bilbao: the first football match in the was built the site of ‘La Campa de los Ingleses’ city was between Britons and Basques and took place on 3 May 1894, and had been considered already then Basques were looking into the future when thinking about their for the football own identity.20 Coincidentally, these early footballing encounters took place in stadium: ‘¿se imaginan qué magnífico ‘La Campa de los Ingleses’.21 Thus British input into the city not only panorama se presentaría involved financial capital and technology, but also cultural practices. la zona con el Guggenheim, un gran MacClancy bases his analysis on Jacki Urla’s anthropological work: campo de fútbol y el Palacio Euskalduna como iconos de refer- Urla makes a related point in her work on current Basque ethnonationalist encia?’ in Albero culture: that many nationalists wish to be seen as both the heirs of a laudable Bacigalupe, ‘La campa de Las Vegas’, Periódico history and also as ‘up-to-date’ as those of their contemporaries in other lands Bilbao, May 2003, p. interested in both the renovation and the recuperation of their way of life.22 45. 22 Jeremy MacClancy, op. MacClancy sees the dynamic interaction between present and past as being cit., pp. 181-99. rooted in culture. Similarly, in the urban context, Andreas Huyssen sees past 23 Andreas Huyssen, 23 Present Pasts: Urban and present narratives interacting in space. In the same way that football was Palimpsests and the adopted by bilbaínos during the period of industrial modernization and became Politics of Memory, one of the key identifiers of the city, the Guggenheim too has now been Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. written into the city’s contemporary narrative. Nevertheless, in this process of rewriting Basque identity the traumas of the past have not disappeared, despite the projection into the future. One of the controversies surrounding the museum was the desire to bring the painting Guernica to the opening as a temporary loan. The petition was turned down by the Museo Reina Sofía on grounds that it would not be safe for the painting to be transported once again. This then developed into a bitter polemic when Xabier Arzalluz, head of the ruling nationalist party,

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PNV, said controversially: ‘da la impresión de lo de siempre: para Euskadi, las 24 Aitor Guenaga, bombas, y para Madrid, el arte’.24 This is a great distortion of history, that ‘Euskadi se lleva las bombas, y Madrid, el blatantly ignores the bombings suffered by many Spanish cities and also arte, según Arzalluz’, ignores the fact that Picasso envisioned his painting as an antifascist symbol. El País: Cultura, 15 May 1997, at These factors did not stop Thomas Krens from taking an active part in the http://www.elpais.es/a debate: ‘[Krens] insistió en que “se trata de algo más que un préstamo. El rticulo.html, accessed pueblo vasco pagó por este cuadro con su sangre”’25. This is part of a wider 27 September 2003. debate on the ownership of art. The Spanish writer Félix de Azúa, in a 25 A. Intxausti and J. Cavestany, ‘Aguirre provocative piece on the Basque claims regarding Guernica quotes the painter admite que se traslade Antonio Saura, who described the painting as a big ugly poster. In Azúa’s el “Guernica” tras un debate técnico’, 17 view Guernica is an invaluable artistic commodity that in the eyes of the May 1997, at Basques has become an ‘itinerant relic’.26 If the claims had been granted, http://www.elpais.es/a then Guernica, one of the key icons of modernism and recent Basque history rticulo.html, accessed 27 September 2003. (and an endlessly reproduced antifascist poster) would have been situated in 26 Féliz de Azúa, the postmodernist ‘Museum of the future’ as a temporary loan. Now the ‘¿Pikasso?’, Arquitectura Guggenheim itself is every bit as much the main theme of posters sold to viva, 55 (July-August tourists in Bilbao. Nevertheless, it is telling that at this crucial point, when 1997), p. 112. Basques were looking into the future, the past was still filtering through: 27 ‘Security tight as Guggenheim opens in Guernica was one of most widely reproduced images displayed in Basque Basque city’, CNN households during the Franco years. World News, 18 October 1997 at In parallel to these past traumas, Basque terrorism remained the single http://edition.cnn.com biggest threat to the success of the Guggenheim. Two days before the opening, /WORLD/9710/18/s pain.museum, accessed a Basque policeman [Ertzaina] named José María Aguirre, who was investi- 27 September 2003. gating a suspicious looking truck, was murdered by ETA. Mourners left 28 Cooje van Bruggen, flowers in the museum grounds. The president of the Basque government, José op. cit.,p. 22. Antonio Ardanza, declared in a tribute that ‘[Aguirre’s] sacrifice has raised this 29 Cooje van Bruggen, museum to a symbol of our freedom.’27 op. cit.,p. 23. The Guggenheim effect has been linked not only to the economic renewal of the city itself, but also to the potential for effecting positive change on the latter’s social problems: a good example would be the start of the ceasefire which began not long after the opening of the museum. About a year later ETA announced a truce, and from 16th September 1998 to 28th November 1999 the organization did not kill anyone. Many started to believe that the Guggenheim effect had something to do with this, although time has proven that even if this was true, the initiative was not sustained. One immediately positive effect was the urban regeneration of the riverside area. It is interesting to note that the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Thomas Krens, presented the finding of the site as an epiphany: that is, the moment, while running through the city that he suddenly saw ‘the geocultural triangle of Bilbao’ between Bellas Artes Museum, the University of Deusto and the Arriaga Theatre.28 Cooje van Bruggen reproduces the map with handwritten notes by Frank Gehry that stress the visual presence of the building from the three angles mentioned.29 That visionary experience is also implicit in the description of the Bilbao writer and illustrator Asun Balzaola, when she describes the city in the 1940s and then goes on to compare the image of the new museum:

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30 Lucía Iglesias, ‘Bilbao: These were the years of iron and we lived at Bilbao, also a city of iron, always the Guggenheim wet, gleaming and black because it was always raining ... [...] The district where effect’, at http://www.unesco.org I spent my childhood has changed beyond belief. Then it was a noisy industrial /courier/1998_09/uk/ area, today it’s a very peaceful place. Bilbao was a grey city like ... well ... signes/txt1.htm, Manchester perhaps. Now it’s white, luminous. [...] When you are inside the accessed 27 September 2003. building, the light, and the spirals of the architecture almost make you forget its 31 Fredric Jameson offers contents. You would almost be willing to visit if it was empty. [...] You walk a contextualized discus- along a street and suddenly there is this great titanium-clad mountain in front of sion of the relationship 30 between surface and you. It plays tricks on you. postmodernism and says the following in connection with This vision of light and loss of senses is problematic from a curatorial perspec- Gehry’s Santa Monica tive since it implies that the building itself, with its reflection, is more house (1979): ‘the important than the works inside.31 However, Victoria Newman assesses this strange new feeling of an absence of inside change in a positive manner: and outside, the bewil- derment and loss of spacial orientation in Gehry’s architecture of movement has produced flowing forms that appear as Portman’s hotels, the film stills: motion caught and made definitive at a particular moment. The result messiness of an environment in which finally restores what Paul Valéry referred to as ‘the mother’ – architecture – to things and people no ‘orphans’ – painting and sculpture.’32 longer find their “place” [...]’, in Fredric Jameson, This church-like quality is also emphasized in connection with Valéry in Postmodernism, or, The Adorno’s essay, where he refers to the latter’s ironic mentions of states such as Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: ‘contemplation’ and ‘sacred awe’.33 If Balzaola’s description ascribes a Duke University Press, cathedral-like spiritual quality to the Guggenheim Museum, then there is 1991, pp. 117-18. another parallel cathedral in the city: San Mamés, the stadium of Athletico de 32 Victoria Newman, op. cit., p. 256. Bilbao, is popularly known as ‘la catedral’ by their fans and followers. Balzaola’s miracle-like vision of the Guggenheim is echoed in the widely 33 Theodor Adorno, op. cit., p. 176. quoted article ‘The Miracle in Bilbao’ by Herbert Muschamp, the architec- 34 Herbert Muschamp, tural critic of the New York Times. Muschamp’s words, however, have a very ‘The Miracle in different resonance after 11 September 2001. Suggesting tourism with a twist, Bilbao’, New York Times Magazine, 7 this quest for danger and for the real is not as unlikely to be realized on September 1997, p. 54. American soil after the attack against the Twin Towers in New York:

This is Basque Country. A region proudly, if not ofﬁcially, independent from the rest of Spain; it is also bleakly free from Spanish sophistication. Oh, and by the way, you might get blown up. Basque Country is not Bosnia. But it’s not Disney World, either. History here has not been sanitized into a colorful spectacle for your viewing enjoyment. People are actually living history here, punctuated by periodic violence. Those who visit Bilbao, however, may come away thinking that art is not entirely remote from matters of life and death.34

If we look at the highly artiﬁcial golden image of the building reproduced in Muschamp’s article (originally placed on the museum’s ﬁrst web pages) where the aura emanating from the cladding is the main focus of the photograph, we can see that this is a city in search of its own global el Dorado. The auratic image can also be linked to the commodity fetishism discussed by

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Theodor Adorno in his essay ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the 35 Theodor W. Adorno, Regression of Listening’.35 Adorno’s analysis of music is a response to Walter ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the Regression of where mechanical reproduction represents the loss of aura.36 This would be Listening’, in Adorno, The Culture Industry, the opposite process to the one symbolized in the auratic image offered by London: Routledge, Muschamp’s review of the museum. Joseba Zulaika, following Benjamin, 1991, pp. 26-52. asserts that, just as in the era of mechanical reproduction, art was inevitably 36 Walter Benjamin, ‘The destined to lose its aura, the devaluing ‘McGuggenheim’ effect of museum Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction was bound to happen, and that the franchise opened in Bilbao Reproduction’, in is an illustration of this.37 However Beatriz Plaza, coming from the field of Illuminations, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970, economics, takes as her basis the very same process, namely reproduction, pp. 219-53. but arrives at the opposite conclusion – reproduction leads not to the loss of 37 Joseba Zulaika, aura but to its accumulation. ‘Potlatch We should also bear in mind that the Guggenheim Bilbao is the result of a arquitectónico’, Arquitectura viva, 55 public/private partnership mirroring prevailing trends in the culture industries (Jul–Aug 1997), p. 22. 38 since the 1980s in the United States and Britain. The wealth created by the 38 For a detailed museum through the sale of materials, from books to pens bearing the branded discussion of the image of the Guggenheim Bilbao, is fundamentally based on the reproduction changes brought by Reagan and Thatcher of that same image. Taken to its logical conclusion, this implies that the into the arts read the museum itself can be replicated elsewhere.39 Beatriz Plaza’s article forms part excellent book by Chin-tao Wu, of a debate between her and María V. Gómez and Sara González. While Plaza Privatising Culture: defends the uniqueness of the Guggenheim, Gómez and González question Corporate Art Intervention since the the project’s claim to uniqueness. As there have in fact been plans to reproduce 1980s, London: Verso, the design of the museum elsewhere, these two authors are perhaps entitled to 2002. Wu’s study offers the historical question whether the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum can truly be considered background to unique.40 Is the franchise a miracle or a mirage? Does it lead to a loss of aura contemporary for the institution or to the creation of wealth? Huyssen sees the answer in the public/private partner- ships such as the one radical change experienced in recent times by museums as social institutions. formed to accomplish His analysis is extremely useful in assessing these two conflicting views on the the Bilbao project. Guggenheim Bilbao which run throughout the critical sources: ‘The original 39 Beatriz Plaza, ‘The Guggenheim-Bilbao artwork has become a device to sell its multiply-reproduced derivatives; repro- Museum Effect: A ducibility turned into a ploy to auraticize the original after the decay of aura, Reply to María V. a final victory of Adorno over Benjamin.’41 Gómez’ “Reflective Images: The Case of These two conflicting interpretations lead us to question the way we think Urban Regeneration in about the role and identity of the contemporary museum. The critical Glasgow and Bilbao”’, International Journal of framework of our theorizing about the museum as a social institution has to Urban and Regional change, since from the very beginning of this particular project the stated Research, 23: 3 (1999), pp. 589-92. agenda was to break away from institutional rules. Thomas Krens wanted to move away from ‘the idea of encyclopaedia’ i.e. the vision of the museum that 40 María V. Gómez and Sara González, ‘A has been presented to its audience ‘in a nineteenth-century box – the Reply to Beatriz Plaza’s extended palace.’42 We therefore have to adapt our critical language to a “The Guggenheim- Bilbao Museum different type of museum, one that explicitly aims to leave the twentieth- Effect”’, International century model behind. Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25: 4 It has already been established that the model of the ‘replicable museum’ (2001), pp. 898-900. has turned out to be the emerging paradigm at the end of the twentieth and 41 Andreas Huyssen, op. beginning of the twenty-first century. For a while, and under the workings of cit., 1995, pp. 23-24.

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42 Cooje van Bruggen, the Guggenheim effect, this has been a successful model. However, critical op. cit., p. 18. voices have recently increased in volume. When does an excess of aura 43 Deyan Sudjic, generate diminishing returns? Deyan Sudjic in his piece on the latest design by ‘Landmarks of hope Frank Gehry (the Walt Disney Concert Hall) adopts a negative view: and glory’, The Observer Review, 26 October 2003, p. 6. This is the way to an architecture of diminishing returns in which every sensa- 44 Llàtzer Moix, ‘El edifi- tional new building must attempt to eclipse the last one. It leads to a kind of cio cosmético’, La Vanguardia Cultura, 24 hyperinflation, the architectural equivalent of the Weimar Republic’s debauching July 2002, p. 17. of its currency.43 45 Deyan Sudjic, ‘Reflective Glory’, Tate Sudjic is pointing out a situation in which the icon is rendered non-iconic Art Magazine, 13 (1997), p. 57. because of the sheer quantity of so-called flagship projects. In this new 46 Andreas Huyssen, context, how unique is the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum? Without doubt it Twilight Memories: has proven extremely successful in terms of promoting a more positive civic Marking Time in a image of Bilbao. But some of the initial claims – for instance that the Culture of Amnesia, London: Routledge, Guggenheim effect would bring peace to the region – have been proven 1995, p. 16. wrong over time. Llàtzer Moix, in La Vanguardia, labels the Guggenheim ‘el edificio cosmético’ and calls Frank Gehry’s artistic practice ‘arquitectura maquillaje’.44 Basques may well have been reflecting on the glory of its titanium surfaces, but time has proven that aesthetics are no substitute for real political dialogue. There is more to this issue than simply considering the museum as a civic panacea. I would argue that Moix fails to take sufficient account of the fact that this populist project was riddled with paradoxes from the very beginning, and that it is because of these paradoxes that the Guggenheim has been so effective in its seduction. As Deyan Sudjic perceptively remarks in his initially enthusiastic reception of the Guggenheim Bilbao: ‘So here we have the paradoxical spectacle of a small nation asserting its own cultural identity by importing culture wholesale, a Basque government funding the construction of an aston- ishingly impressive landmark by securing America’s most admired living architect.’45 On the current boom in the development of new museums, Huyssen sees a real need in contemporary society to renegotiate the past and our own relationship with death:

Against the anti-museum discourse still dominant among intellectuals, one might even see the museum as our own memento mori, and as such, a life-enhancing rather than mummifying institution in an age bent on the destructive denial of death: the museum thus as a site and testing ground for reﬂections on temporality and subjectivity, identity and alterity.46

However, his words resonate differently in the Basque context, against the backdrop of political violence. The auratic effect may have been rubbed off by the Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles and the global plans of the Guggenheim Museum have not been fully realized in the current world climate. Yet despite recent setbacks, the

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Guggenheim effect in Bilbao is still a powerful symbol of urban renewal whose 47 Andreas Huyssen, ibid. base has been firmly rooted in local visual and social tensions: its highly stylized reflective building confronts us in a city found among green hills yet scattered with industrial ruins and harsh architecture. The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum can be seen as a reflection on the anthropological need in contemporary society to ‘negotiate and to articulate a relationship to the past that is also always a relationship to the transitory and to death, our own included’.47 Alongside the tension between urban decay and renewal, the project would have not been realized without the political tensions, which forced Basques to reflect on their own future identity, at least in part. Bilbao achieved its refusal to die and to become an industrial mausoleum by building a museum that reflected a Basque identity as a projection into the future, a non-violent future that has yet to materialize – a potential only just glimpsed during the brief ceasefire.

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Cultural Studies Cultural Studies Cultural Studies European Culture The Last Empire: Negotiating Spain & the Media Thirty years of and Catalonia Portuguese Decolonization

Edited by Ib Bondebjerg Edited by Stewart Lloyd-Jones By Fernando León Solís and Peter Golding and António Costa Pinto Paper, £19.95/$39.95 Paper, £14.95/$29.95 Paper, £19.95/$39.95 1-84150-077-1 1-84150-111-5 1-84150-109-3 Cloth, £29.95/$59.95 1-84150-110-7 A narrative study of four This book is the result of a main discourses of national We are witnessing a dynamic conference organised by the identity in Spain, with a Contemporary Portuguese reshaping of the European special focus on Catalonia, ‘mediascape’. This is happening Political History Research Centre alongside the rapid reconstruc- (CPHRC) and the University of as disseminated in the tion of the cultural and Dundee that took place during Spanish press in the period economic landscape of Europe September 2000. The purpose of between 1993-1996. The itself. In this transformation the this conference, and the study includes analyses of communicative and ideological resulting book, was to bring the Spanish press coverage dimensions, the digitisation of together various experts in the of the 1994 USA Football technology, and the changes in field to analyse and debate the World Cup, and the process process of Portuguese decoloni- culture – ‘the imaginary’, the of negotiation towards a pact discursive universe of politics sation, which was then 25 years and communication, are all old, and the effects of this on the between Partido Popular crucial areas of research. This Portuguese themselves. This is and Convergència I Unió in book presents new research and the first book that takes a central government. thinking, with particular focus multidisciplinary look at both the Contents include: on and in depth analysis of a causes and the consequences of • Four Discourses of Spain number of cases and dimen- Portuguese decolonisation – and and Catalonia sions in European media culture is the only one that places the • The Game of the Nation: loss of Portugal’s Eastern and its broader social, polical Football and Identity and economic context. It is the Empire in the context of the loss first in the Changing Media, of its African Empire. Changing Europe series of Furthermore, it is the only books, produced from the work English language book that of the European Science relates the process of Foundation Programme of that Portuguese decolonisation with name. the search for a new Portuguese vision of its place in the world.

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